State spends $1 million a week to keep 2,000 homeless families in motels

Dianne Freeman and her son are one of more than 2,000 homeless families living in motels paid for by the state. At $82 a night per family, Massachusetts is spending $1 million a week to shelter all these families in motels. Last May, their numbers totaled 1,222 families.

A double bed, a folded cot, one chair and a small table use up nearly all the floor space in a Braintree motel room that Dianne Freeman and her 20-year-old son have called home for close to a year.

Freeman and her son are one of more than 2,000 homeless families living in motels paid for by the state. At $82 a night per family, Massachusetts is spending $1 million a week to shelter all these families in motels. Last May, their numbers totaled 1,222 families.

While homelessness has declined nationally by nine 9 percent since 2007, it increased 25 percent in Massachusetts during the same time period, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In Quincy public schools, the tally of homeless students has mirrored this trend, increasing from 189 students four years ago to 220 in the current school year.

Maura Papile, director of student support services in the Quincy schools, expects the final count this year to go even higher by June.

"Families are staying homeless longer," said Papile. "It's a really hard way to live."

The surge of homeless families in the state happened despite the goal set by Gov. Deval Patrick in 2008 to eliminate family homelessness and end the practice of sheltering homeless families in motels.

To explain the increase, state officials point to the lingering effects of the Great Recession that began in 2007, cuts to federal aid and to the simple fact that Massachusetts is obligated by statute to shelter homeless families.

Rising rents coupled with job loss, low wages or stagnant income have also played a role in the growing number of evictions seen statewide and south of Boston, which sometimes result in homelessness.

Joseph Finn, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance and an at-large councilor in Quincy, said that the state needs to develop a more individualized approach to helping families.

"The predominant number of families are younger women with children. What is the resource they need most?" he said. "Why is it that that family can make it and this one cannot?"

Like others who question the current system, Finn looks at the huge resources being spent to shelter homeless families in motels.

"There's got to be a better way of investing this that makes sense for housing," he said.

The state offers several programs aimed at preventing homelessness and getting families out of shelters. Last year, the Residential Assis tance Program for Families in Transition saved more than 3,000 families from becoming homeless, said Aaron Gornstein, the state's undersecretary for housing and community development.

Since 2007, Gornstein's agency has created more than 4,000 subsidized housing units and preserved another 10,000 privately- owned, subsidized and affordable apartments that were in danger of shifting into market-rate housing units.

Page 2 of 2 - But Gov. Patrick told The Associated Press in January that existing strategies to fight homelessness won't work over the long haul.

"We're going to have to think in some fresh ways," he said. "I'm really worried about this. It's not just the spike in the number. It's what the economy has done to vulnerable people."

Back at the Braintree motel, Dianne Freeman also wants to come up with some fresh ideas to free herself and her son from homelessness and a cramped motel room. She wants to use the state's housing assistance program to purchase a winterized recreational vehicle and build a small business, growing hydroponic vegetables.

Freeman's path to homelessness is a unique one. She was in foster care, living in Hingham, when she graduated from Thayer Academy in Braintree in 1979 and went off to study at New York University. After dropping out of college, she moved to Jamaica, became a small farmer, then set up a nonprofit to help poor, rural villagers.

Just as she was working with the Jamaican government on an eco tourism project in 2001, Freeman was bitten by a poisonous spider and suffered a series of disabling medical problems.

Living in a motel room with her son since April, Freeman is trying not to despair.

"I am not the only one in this plight," she said, sitting on her bed near a sewing machine and a Bible.

John Yazwinski, president and CEO of Father Bill's & Main Spring, a nonprofit that serves homeless people in the Brockton and Quincy areas, said the state needs more "creative engagement" to reduce the numbers of homeless families such as Freeman and her son.

"We are spending a tremendous amount on the motels," he said. "To be able to switch that to have more families in housing, we'd have to reform written policies at the state level."

Above all else, Yazwinski stressed support for job training and child day care that need to be built in to help most people in their plights with housing.

And housing advocates agree that the longer families remain in shelter or motels, the harder it is to get out.

"The motels are frustrating," said Carolyn Sheppard, a social worker who heads the housing program at Quincy Community Action Programs. "You see families who with a little bit of assistance might not end up homeless at all."

Sheppard and other social workers visit the 270 families now living in motels in Braintree, Brockton, Norton, Norwell and Weymouth.

"You can't be a kid there. There's no place to play," Sheppard said. "There are people in there over a year. After a while, they get resigned and used to it."

Chris Burrell may be reached at cburrell@ledger.com or follow on Twitter @Burrell_Ledger.